


your skin makes me cry

by boychik



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Books, F/F, Masochism, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Sadism, Super High-School Level Murderer, Super High-School Level Swimmer, Swimming, creepin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Touko’s eyes burn on the back of Asahina’s neck. Asahina slaps the back of her neck like that creepy crawley feeling she gets is a mosquito, but no, it’s just Touko’s laser beam stare. </p>
            </blockquote>





	your skin makes me cry

**Author's Note:**

> I began another speculative story after Fukawa & Togami failed to murder each other. I thought Asahina would be up for the challenge of killing Miss Touko. I was wrong again, of course...so here's another "what if" story.

Touko’s eyes burn on the back of Asahina’s neck. Asahina slaps the back of her neck like that creepy crawley feeling she gets is a mosquito, but no, it’s just Touko’s laser beam stare. 

She’s caught Touko staring at her mouth and her breasts and her thighs, always with the same lascivious look on her face. She wants to shake her or kick her or slap her but fears that any bodily contact would only encourage her more.

Asahina shudders and wishes she brought a change of clothes to this terrible school. Even if she feels most comfy and free in her tank and track jacket and denim cutoff shorts, she’d gladly don a bodysuit if it would quell creepy literary girl’s glares and smirks and blushing sneers. Touko is too strange to spend much time near water—come to think of it, most everyone besides Sakura is pretty strange here—so Asahina turns to the water as she always has.

She needs to feel the water on her skin like she needs to breathe or eat donuts or hear Sakura’s gentle voice gush stoic through her head and heart, full of kindness and reason.

Asahina doesn’t like the smell of books, that musty stink of them languishing in cardboard boxes, their old ink rotting from disuse, clumps of dead-tree particles lodged in the spines and fuming off the pages and filling her fingers with its insidious stench. She’s never found freedom in flipping through pages, trying unsuccessfully to decipher the words on the page—even after she’d struggled through a few paragraphs it usually just went over her head anyway. It’s because Asahina’s parents loved to read, the harder book the better, or so it seemed to Asahina. They had no children’s books in the Asahina household. Instead, their many bookshelves were lined with varieties of Kant, Derrida, Nietzsche, Freud, Fermat, Feynman, Mishio Kaku. It made her head spin. Some mutation of the DNA failed to pass down their bibliophilic gene to their daughter, and instead morphed into an unquenchable desire to swim.

But Byakuya and Fukawa love books, that’s for sure. Togami spends all his free time in the library, hanging out with the lamps and snakey black cords and reading newspaper clippings all day. Asahina vaguely remembers a documentary she saw as a child about a brilliant man who descended into madness. He was a mathematician who started seeing messages from God in the clippings. Certain words appeared to him with halos shining around them, like biblical figures in religious oil paintings in a Catholic church. The man would circle different words in different colors of ink depending on what he thought the haloed words meant. When he was done, he hung up all the scraps and scribbles in his office. It looked like a huge, shaggy paper coat. To anyone else, these actions appeared completely useless, the words circled utterly random. But to him, they meant something. That’s what Asahina thinks Togami is doing in there. Not the God part, of course. But squinting through those silver glasses (element Ag, atomic number 47, she knew from her parents’ grand chart of The Periodic Table of the Elements (elephants, Asahina always joked when she was younger) and those awful inculcations at school; no matter she didn’t know what any of it meant and what she learned whizzed joyously in one ear and out the other, with a brief reveal of her innocent ignorance and confusion demarcated in the streaky red marks on all of her quizzes, now and then a random bit of information would stick gray and porous in her head and pop up at random times) and scribbling furiously, color-coding messages that only he can make any sense of.

Fukawa, on the other hand, is even farther gone. Before they came to this dreadful school she _wrote_ books. _Wrote_ them. Even the thought makes Asahina squirm. Wasn’t sitting through weekly composition in school bad enough for her? Why did she feel the need to bring her smelly scratches into this world? They said she wrote romance novels, in fact had had a big hit with some story about a fisherman and the girl he loved, but knowing Touko and her disgusting gaze, it was probably just a ledger of her prurient fantasies. Prurient…Asahina knows the word because her mother warned her away from people expressing a _prurient_ interest. If it’s prurient, it’s no good. Writing books! Unless you're already a writer, it’s completely unhealthy.

Asahina shrugs. To each her own, she supposes. But why no one else recognizes the feeling of swimming as she does is a total mystery.

Asahina slices through the water. This is a beautiful pool, smooth and long and cool and blue. She could not ask for a simpler or more glorious pleasure. Even though she’s not wearing goggles, the water does not sting her eyes. She walks upside down on her hands, then swims one hundred laps. She pushes off the smooth cement walls with her birdlike feet and does a series of somersaults underwater. Asahina Aoi is indefatigable!

She pushes up through a ticklish plume of bubbles and smiles. Her eyes are screwed up, but she opens them just to look through that gorgeous clear expanse—

When _whattheactualfuck,_ that demon’s in front of her face!

“Demoness, please,” Syo sneers. “It’s so much more…sexual, don’t you think?”

Her twin braids float behind her like reins or snakes. Two reins that no one can control. Two black snakes, hissing and spitting like a less prolific, less merciful Medusa.

“N—” Asahina says. That’s as far as she gets before water rushes into her mouth and she has to bob to the surface for air.

 _This is stupid,_ Asahina thinks, mouth open, huffing over the cement edge of the pool. The spike in her heartbeat calms as she dismisses the possibility of anyone else being in the water. _No one’s used the pool since we got here. No one’s ever been here but me. It’s probably just a nightmare, only I’m awake. Probably. What is that called? A hallucination? Yeah. I’ll just go down again and swim a couple more laps then g—_

A sharp yank on her ankle brings her below the surface.

Floating before her is, unfortunately, still Fukawa Touko. Genocider Syo. Whoever she is. It doesn’t really matter because to Asahina’s mind, they’re both prurient, both terrible.

 _She’s still here?_ Asahina blinks. _Sakura’s right, I’ve got to get more sleep._

The flash of silver belonging to the notorious scissors is nowhere to be seen, but that doesn’t mean that Fukawa, no, Syo could whip out a pair any second.

At least it’s probably not real, what she’s seeing.

“It’s real, all right,” says Genocider Syo.

Asahina suddenly feels like she’s suddenly been transported to the coldest place in the world. Colder than Antarctica. Colder than Siberia. Colder than Timbuktu and Mars put together. 

It’s probably real.

That means it’s time to go.

Asahina tries to push off Syo’s face and dart away—she was always the fastest and the strongest member of the swim team, you’d think combined with the adrenaline that would be a little help in this situation, but no—Fukawa—no, Syo—hell, they’re basically the same person and what does she care anyway _she has to get away from this prurient attacker—!_

But somehow her body is being controlled by her mind. This is a foreign sensation to Asahina. No matter how panicked or confused she felt in the past, she had always counted on her genetic mutation to see her through. Her disconnect between her relatively useless brain and her brilliant body. If she was hopelessly lost in an algebra test, her hands didn’t shake or sweat. If she was running or swimming, her mind could easily shut down, and her body kept moving, usually even better than when she had to waste energy on her mind. Her body was always reliable, always fast and strong. But now she’s been caught in a tangle—horrible—the worst—jerking back and forth—she’s small and weak and all tangled up in two disgusting overlong braids.

Syo has caught Asahina’s wrist and ankle in her skinny white hands. Her braids drift over Asahina’s shoulder, underwater. Black tendrils brush Asahina’s cheek, wrap slowly around her neck. It’s like being lovingly stroked by bug-eyed, hairy caterpillars. It’s like being slowly choked by a pair of silk scarves. After a few minutes they calmly drift over her face and bind like a blindfold across her eyes.

Asahina thrashes against the lacuna of Syo’s chest.

“You only kill pretty boys, what are you doing with me, you freak?” Each word is distorted. Asahina swallows a pint of chlorine and coughs.

“I’m just here to play.” Syo giggles dangerously. “This pool was so fresh and clean, I could hardly leave it that way, huh? Only one little virgin swam in it—you are a virgin, right, Aoi?” She cocks her head and pinches Asahina between the thighs.

“Hey, are you wet?” she says. “I am.” It’s a horrible look that’s on her face, half-lidded and red and drooling…

“Water is wet!” Asahina screams, and bangs her head backward, smacking Genocider Syo in the face. There’s a muted cracking sound, diffused by the water.

“Ouch!” Syo bounces back from the bottom of the pool, clutching her nose. It’s bleeding a little bit, spiraling red up into the water. “What was that for? They say you’re a sweet girl, Aoi, but maybe there’s more where that came from, hmmm?”

Asahina is in shock. She came back from a hit that strong? Normally that attack was designed to leave her opponent crying on the floor—well, it _should_ have in any case, since she’d only ever had occasion to use it on the dummies in self-defense class when she was twelve—but—

Secondly, Asahina switched gears quickly, what kind of person likes pain? It’s unthinkable. Asahina is all for pleasure: She swims because it brings her pleasure—some say pain, but they are wrong. A few aching muscles are nothing compared to the magnificent sense of clarity and peace—besides, it hurts good. She eats doughnuts, not because they’re disgusting garbage (No, nothing like the plaited specimen before her) but because they’re delicious. It’s a simple as that.

There’s something very wrong with Syo, Asahina realizes. Something that makes her seek out the most painful thing for herself, and for others. Writing is possibly the worst occupation one could have: Writing was spinning those endless, tortured hours in study hall and weekly composition into a lifetime of pain. That’s what Touko did. And Touko is Syo. They’re one and the same. That’s why she broke. They’re one and the same.

“Haven’t you ever thought about doing it with a guy?” Syo would have cooed if her voice wasn’t so screechy and discordant and totally incapable of making beautiful or calming sounds.

“N-no!” Asahina says, but she doesn’t want to lie. “Well, yeah, but everyone has, so…”

“Gyahahahahaheehehee!” Syo screams. “You’re so diiiiiiirty! What about with a girl, then, huh?”

“No!” Asahina says. “Of course not! I have better things to think about!” _Better than_ you—she completed the thought in her mind.

“A-sa-hi-naaaaaa! You’re a liaaaaaaar! What do we do with girls who lie?”

“I’m not!” Asahina starts to yell. “You’re the one—” But water bubbles up into her lungs and she swallows what feels like a gallon of chlorine in a second. Ugh, she’s burning, her body is so heavy and her lungs are so full and her throat is so rough and she can’t even see straight through all those pounds of hair—

Syo starts to slip her skinny white hand up toward the cleft of Asahina’s legs.

“Guess those virgin skin cells weren’t so pure after all, A-sa-hi-na…what disgusting, filthy cells you have, sloughing off your pervert skin and mucking up the nice clean water,” Syo mutters in Asahina’s blind seashell ears. She’s tracing a familiar pattern into the inside of Asahina’s thigh with her long sharp fingernails, pressing hard, scratching through the epidermis to draw two circles and two lines over and over, the pattern of scissors, blades a red gash a mouth wide wide open and ready to cut. 

Asahina puts her hand up to Syo’s neck, and with the last bit of her strength not swallowed by the panic of her mind, squeezes hard.

\---

Two girls are floating in the pool.

They are the shape and color of humans. But they are not humans anymore.

Their dark hair floats away from their skulls and tangles atop the flat, clear surface of the water. It’s impossible to tell where one girl’s hair ends and the other’s begins.

Purple blossoms across their necks and faces. Red trickles from between their legs.

Under the water, their bruised knuckles brush, ever so slightly.

The girls are together.

\---

“Attention!” Monobear yells. A huge, robotic grin decorates his round face. “A body has been discovered. You have 24 hours before the school trial commences.”

His pudgy frame does a little jitterbug as the school collectively sinks one step further into the marsh of despair. There is a trace of delight in his motion as his wired hindquarters, one black, one white, bob up and down to a rhythm that no one else can hear.


End file.
